Guy Gavriel Kay is the author of one of my three favourite books ever (Lions of Al-Rassan), and another seven of his books make up the rest of my top 10 most days.
He is a man who writes for and with the heart. So while the part of me that is my brain read Under Heaven and quite enjoyed pointing out minor things that were wrong with the book (I’ll come back to them), the part of me that is my heart found itself laughing and crying and, most importantly, deeply caring about the characters and what happened to them. And surely, that is what counts as success in a novel!
Under Heaven is set in a fictionalised 8th century (Tang Dynasty) China (though interestingly not in Kay’s “usual” universe under the two moons – this world only has one). After Last Light of the Sun and Ysabel, Under Heaven is also a return to the more familiar style and subject matter of sophisticated medieval courts and civilisations, the interplay of politics and art, the effect of world-shattering events on ordinary individuals.
When Shen Tai, second son of the great General Shen Gao, concludes the mourning period for his father, during which he has been burying the dead of battles past between his own native Kitai and their age-old enemy the Taguran Empire, a Kitan princess given as wife to the Taguran Emperor 20 years ago makes him a gift. It is a gift which catapults Tai from two years of solitude at the edge of civilisation straight into the intrigues and machinations of the dangerous, sophisticated imperial court at Xinan in what are… interesting times, much in the sense of the old Chinese curse.
Along the way Tai meets a poet and a Kanlin warrior sent to guard his life by a former lover, he encounters generals, prefects, princes, the Emperor’s powerful concubine and the Emperor himself. He makes friends and enemies and in the end does something which two years of solitude were not enough to help him do – he finds himself and what he wants.
A second plot thread is that of Tai’s sister Shen Li-Mei, elevated to Imperial Princess by the intrigues of their older brother Liu and sent away as bride to the heir to the kaghan of the Bogü people beyond the Long Wall, her life changed forever in ways that no one could have anticipated.
Here is what my brain says is wrong with this book:
The protagonist spends the entire first part (164 pages) trying to get laid. And yes, a lot of that is a metaphor for emerging from isolation and heading back towards civilisation, but my brain still sniggered on page 164.
Writing the Other: This is the first real excursion Kay makes into writing about cultures that are significantly different from our own, rather than precursors of our own. All his previous books have had, more or less, European medieval settings. With the shift to medieval Asia there is a very significant challenge of writing about a culture that is deeply alien. Some parts of the book are successful in this respect, but others are not. The passage which grates the most is the one where the family of our main character is shown explicitly to have morals closer to those of the modern reader than the rest of the culture they live in. In all fairness, in this I am comparing Kay to someone like Chinua Achebe who manages effortlessly to immerse us in an alien culture to the point where, when the white invaders come we take sides against them. I do, however, believe that Kay is a sufficiently accomplished writer that he should be able to do this, if he consciously tried.
Bechdel: This is partially related to the point above, but only partially. The book passes the Bechdel Test – barely, if you squint at it the right way, and if you, like me, are a huge Kay fan and really really want him to pass the Bechdel Test. Kay is very good at writing strong female characters, and a number of them will stay in my mind and heart forever: Jehanne, Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, Lisseult, Ariane de Carenzu, Dianora, Alixana, and a few others. But I would have to go back and re-read those books to check whether they actually pass the Bechdel test, because I’m really not sure. Under Heaven is in a similar situation, in that we don’t lack for strong female characters – from the Kanlin Warrior protecting Tai, to his sister, his former lover and the Emperor’s concubine – but they hardly ever meet, and they almost never actually talk to each other. This is not something that can’t be fixed with a little conscious effort, which is why it grates quite so much when it happens, especially in a book I otherwise love.
Finally, potatoes: Yes, this is extremely minor, and mostly me being a pedant, but at one point Tai passes farms which grow potatoes. In China. In the 8th century. Now, I’ll admit that I had to check. My knowledge of food history is European-centric (I have possibly spent too much time thinking about what Europeans ate before they started trading with Asia and discovered America, and have reached the conclusion that it was a very sad time indeed), but as far as I knew potatoes hadn’t come to Europe until the Renaissance. A little bit of research reveals that potatoes weren’t introduced to China until the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century.
So far about my brain. This is what my heart said:
My heart let my brain write sarcastic notes in the margin until about page 200. It was a slow start to the book, particularly those first 164 pages until Tai gets laid. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t find it terribly engaging at that point because we spent so much time looking at things from an exclusively male point of view. There is, of course, a point to the slow start. The protagonist has spent two years in almost complete isolation when the world begins catching up with him. The pace of the writing in this section reflects Tai’s state of mind, something that Kay is very good at doing.
After about page 200, I found the book a lot more engaging, and around the end of the second part, Under Heaven became almost impossible to put down. I had some late nights this week, because I wanted to know what happened. What is perhaps most surprising is the bond I developed with the main characters without noticing. When Tai, Spring Rain, Li-Mei and Wei Song make their respective decisions at the end, they are all described as having reached those conclusions a long time ago but not having fully realised it. This is a little bit how I felt when, reading certain passages in the last few chapters, I started to cry. I didn’t know I cared that much.
At this point, I would quite like to quote a couple of sentences from the final chapter – Kay is good with endings – but I am not allowed until the book is published so I shan’t. Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed Under Heaven, though it’s not quite as sublime as Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic. I do suspect that, like the Mosaic, it will grow on me further on a second reading, too.
Under Heaven is published in hardback at the end of April, and my Amazon pre-order for a non-ARC copy still stands.